So Oldcastle became Falstaff, though one or two hints of his former identity can still be found in Henry IV Part I. As early in the play as I.ii.41, Prince Hal calls him 'my old lad of the castle'; and II.ii.103
, 'Away, good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death' would scan a good deal better with the substitution of the old name for the new. To avoid any similar misunderstandings, other drinking companions of the Prince were also given new identities. 'Harvey', the name of the third husband of the mother of Lord Southampton,1 became 'Bardolph', and 'Russell', the family name of the Earls (later Dukes) of Bedford, was changed to 'Peto'. Now at last Shakespeare could promote his two plays without fear of opposition and even - almost certainly in deference to a wish expressed by the Queen herself to see Falstaff as a lover — add a third, written in two or three weeks and first performed before her on 23 April 1597: The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The first three acts of King Henry IV Part I are
essentially antiphonal: serious political discussions are interspersed with comic scenes between Falstaff and Prince Hal, some set in in the latter's apartments at Rochester and Gadshill, others at the Boar's Head Tavern, Eastcheap. Quite apart from The Famous Victories, there was plenty of good evidence for Hal's riotous living: according to one contemporary source, the Prince 'was in his youth a diligent follower of idle practices, much given to instruments
Henry Wriothesley, thought by many to be the 'Mr W.H.' to whom the First Quarto of the Sonnets is dedicated.
of music, and fired with the torches of Venus herself,'1 and many other chroniclers tell the same story. Shakespeare, in fact, lets him off remarkably lightly. He allows only a single oblique reference to the popular (if almost certainly baseless) story of the Prince's physical assault on the Chief Justice Sir William Gascoigne2 - though there will be more of this, introduced for very different reasons, in Part II; and he makes no mention at all of young Henry's unaccountable appearance before his father in what Holinshed describes as 'a gowne of blew satten, full of small oilet holes, at euerie hole the needle hanging by a silke thred with which it was sewed'. It seems, in short, that he is anxious to emphasize throughout that Hal's youthful follies were, in the words of the great nineteenth-century historian William Stubbs, 'the frolics of a high-spirited young man, indulged in the open air of the town and camp; not the deliberate pursuit of vicious excitement in the fetid atmosphere of a court'. Such habits can be cast aside when the moment comes and, as early as the second scene in the play, the Prince's final soliloquy leaves us in no doubt that they will be. Later, in IIIii, he gives a similar reassurance to his father:
For the time will come
That I shall make this northern youth exchange
His glorious deeds for my indignities.
What Shakespeare does not tell us - and the King himself seems to forget - is that the Prince's life was by no means entirely dissolute. As early as September 1400 he had accompanied his father into Wales on his first expedition against Glendower and had remained all the winter at Chester, where the rebels were summoned to present themselves before him on 30 November. In April 1401 he had advanced into Wales with Hotspur, recovering Conway Castle in May and securing the submission of Merioneth and Carnarvon shortly afterwards. In August - Hotspur having departed - he had led another attack, and was still on campaign when the King joined him in October. The following year was admittedly quiet enough, and would have left him plenty of
1. Titus Livius Forojuliensis, an Italian in the service of Humphrey of Gloucester,
writing c. 1437.
2. Thy place in Council thou has rudely lost', III.ii.32
.
time for the Boar's Head, though even in those days he might have been thought a little young: on 9 August he celebrated his fifteenth birthday. On 7 March 1403, however, he was appointed by the Council to represent his father in Wales, and in May he invaded the country yet again, destroying two of Glendower's principal castles. He was still there in July, when he received word to meet Henry at Shrewsbury: the Percys had risen in rebellion.
Precisely why they did so remains a mystery. The King himself was taken by surprise - when he heard the news at Lichfield on 16 July he had actually been on his way north to assist them. There were probably several reasons. Doubtless the affair of the Homildon prisoners played its part, as did Henry's continuing refusal to ransom Mortimer; but the greatest grievance of all was the non-payment of the considerable expenses, amounting to some £20,000, that the Percys had incurred doing his work for him along the border. As recently as 26 June Northumberland himself had written to the King, setting out the situation and requesting urgent payment so that the realm would not be disgraced at the next encounter with the Scots. Though strongly worded it contained no hint of disrespect, far less of disloyalty, and some historians have concluded that the Earl still had no thought of rebellion in his mind, and had allowed himself to be persuaded only at the last moment by his ever-impetuous son.
One can only say that it seems unlikely. Four years before, Northumberland had not hesitated to swear an oath to King Richard that he would be permitted to retain his crown;1 and even if he were not himself a prime mover, he cannot have been unaware of the conspiracy that his son had devised with the help of the Archbishop of York Richard Scrope, Owen Glendower and his son-in-law Mortimer, who had married Owen's daughter a few months before. Its object was to depose Henry in favour of Mortimer's son and Hotspur's nephew the young Earl of March — now twelve years old - leaving Wales independent under Owen; and it was in pursuit of this aim that Hotspur had arrived on 9 July in Chester with his uncle the Earl of Worcester, his erstwhile captive Douglas, a number of other Scottish prisoners whom he had set free and 160 horse. His claim that King Richard was also with them had immediate effect in the old loyalist stronghold, and
1. See p. 120.
he was acclaimed with enthusiasm; a day or two later, however, on his march south to join Glendower, this last pretence was dropped. Edmund of March was declared the rightful King, while 'Henry of Lancaster' was accused of breaking the oath he had sworn at Doncaster1 and starving Richard to death.
Henry, meanwhile, had acted fast. The important thing was to prevent the rebels joining up with Glendower. After a few days spent collecting troops, on 20 July he had led his army on a forced march to Shrewsbury. The Percys, arriving the next morning and finding the gates closed to them, withdrew some three miles to the north along the Whitchurch road, taking up a strong position on the slope of the Hayteley field in the parish of Albright Hussey. Henry followed, drawing up his own forces at the foot of the slope. At this point, the chroniclers tell us, Hotspur called for his favourite sword, only to be told that it had been left behind in the village of Berwick, where he had spent the previous night without being told exactly where he was. When he heard the name he immediately remembered the words of a fortune-teller that he would die in Berwick, which till then he had always assumed was Berwick-on-Tweed. 'Then,' he murmured, 'has my plough reached its last furrow!' Peace talks, mediated by the Abbot of Shrewsbury, came to nothing; and around noon the King gave the order to attack. The Prince of Wales, though wounded in the face by an arrow from one of the Cheshire archers, led his men up the slope and engaged the rebels hand-to-hand. Hotspur and Douglas meanwhile, with a band of thirty chosen followers, cut their way through to the royal standard and dashed it to the ground; but they failed to kill the King, who had by now dispatched thirty of the rebels on his own account, despite being forced three times to his knees. Shortly afterwards Hotspur, pressing on as always ahead of his men, was struck down. The word spread quickly among his followers. With Worcester and Douglas captured, they had no more stomach for the fight; and by nightfall the battle was over.
It was Saturday, 21 July. Two days afterwards Worcester, together with two other rebel knights, was executed as a traitor. The body of Hotspur was buried in the family chapel at Whitchurch, but it did not remain there long. To scotch the inevitable rumours that he was still al
ive it was brought back to Shrewsbury, rubbed in salt to preserve it
1. See p. 118.
as long as possible, and finally propped up between two milestones next to the town pillory. Later the head was cut off and fixed on one of the gates of York; the trunk was quartered, the four quarters being separately hung above the gates of London, Bristol, Chester and Newcastle.
Henry now hurried northwards to meet Northumberland, who submitted to him at York on 11 August. He was put into custody and made to surrender his castles, but his life was spared. The King then turned back towards the south-west for a short campaign in Wales, before returning to London for the winter. His problems were by no means over. After four attempts to crush it, Glendower's rebellion still prospered; the French were threatening - and occasionally raiding -the south coast, and the financial position was still desperate. His victory at Shrewsbury and his successes over the Percys had mildly increased his popularity, and his son had distinguished himself by his courage; but heaven, he believed, continued to frown on the usurper, and the future looked bleak.
Act III of Henry IV Part I is virtually all the work of Shakespeare's imagination. It begins with the conspirators: Hotspur, Worcester, Mortimer and Owen Glendower himself. The meeting does not augur well for the coming rebellion: Hotspur begins by announcing that he has forgotten the map; Glendower reassures him; and immediately the two begin to quarrel, the Welshman boasting of the dreadful portents that attended his birth,1 his supernatural powers and his military exploits, while Hotspur mocks him and deliberately makes himself as objectionable as he can. Just in time, it seems, Glendower leaves the room, to return shortly afterwards with his daughter Lady Mortimer and Hotspur's wife, Lady Percy. (In line 190 Mortimer is made to refer to the latter as his aunt: she was in fact his sister.) Of these ladies the chroniclers tell us virtually nothing; it is Shakespeare who breathes life into them. He makes gentle fun of the Mortimers' problems of communication — they speak not a word of each other's languages - but gives Lady Mortimer Welsh songs to sing. Lady Percy, by contrast, whom we have met before in the previous act, is full of spirit, exchanging good-humoured badinage with her husband - although, despite his insistence, she refuses
1. These portents were said to have attended the birth of Mortimer, not Glendower. Shakespeare makes a common mistake in confusing the two.
to compete vocally with her sister-in-law. The scene ends without the conspirators' plans having been appreciably advanced.
It is followed by a confrontation between the King and the Prince of Wales. Henry berates his son for his dissolute life, the Prince claiming that the rumours are exaggerated. At the same time, however, he expresses his regrets for the pain he has given his father and promises not only to change his ways but to cover himself with glory. (That the time for this reform has not yet come is to be made all too clear by the third scene of the act, which is set in the Boar's Head.) Just before the end of this confrontation scene there appears Sir Walter Blunt - a good deal more important in the play than is the simple standard-bearer we know from Holinshed - with a report that the rebels are on the march. They were not, as Blunt reports, at Shrewsbury but at Chester, and the orders now given by the King - that his son should advance through Gloucestershire and meet him at Bridgnorth — are still more at variance with the facts, if only because, as we have seen, the Prince was already in the west when the news broke. But such minor inaccuracies fall well within the bounds of normal artistic licence and should not be taken too seriously.
The same cannot altogether be said of Shakespeare's account of the battle itself which, with its preliminaries and its immediate aftermath, takes up the two last acts of Henry IV Part I. Act IV begins on the eve of the encounter, Friday 20 July, with Hotspur and the recently released Douglas learning from a messenger that Northumberland is sick and unable to join them. According to Holinshed the earl's illness, whatever it may have been, had actually struck him earlier; by the time the rebellion began he had recovered, and on the day of the battle he was already on the way to join his son. But Shakespeare, building up his drama, is anxious to show us the situation in the Percys' camp deteriorating minute by minute. There now arrives Sir Richard Vernon — by Holinshed barely rated a mention - with news that the King himself is on the march, together with his younger son John of Lancaster,1 the Earl of Westmorland, and of course the Prince of Wales himself:
1. Prince John was only thirteen at the time of the battle of Shrewsbury. There is no historical record of his having been present. Shakespeare presumably introduces him here, rather than his elder brother Thomas of Clarence, because of his importance in the Gaultree Forest scene (IV.i) of Henry IV Part II.
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cushes on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.
Finally Vernon - who seems to take considerable pleasure in the delivery of bad news - reveals that Glendower and his men cannot be there for another fourteen days. This last report puts paid to Hotspur's optimism: his courage is undiminished, but he knows his cause is lost. 'Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily' - and, he suggests, the sooner the better. He even wants to launch the attack that same night, and Douglas and the rest are still trying to persuade him to wait till the morrow when Sir Walter Blunt - rather than the Abbot of Shrewsbury - arrives from the King in the hopes of negotiating a peace. He is sent back with a promise that Worcester will bring Henry terms in the morning; but that interview,1 despite the King's offer to take no punitive action if the rebels will disband their forces, is no more successful than the first. 'To save the blood on either side', the Prince offers to meet Hotspur in single combat (a challenge for which there is no evidence anywhere in the chronicles), but Worcester ignores it. He returns to the rebel camp, having resolved not even to report the King's generous terms, which he does not for a moment believe;2 and the two armies prepare for battle. Only old Falstaff confesses what all of them are feeling:
I would 'twere bed-time, Hal, and all well.
Shakespeare's version of the battle of Shrewsbury begins with the killing by the Earl of Douglas of Sir Walter Blunt, one of the four knights who were, according to Holinshed, 'apparelled in the kings
Vi.9-114.
Cf. Holinshed: 'The earle of Worcester (vpon his returne to his nephue) made relation cleane contrarie to that the king had said, in such sort that he set his nephues hart more in displeasure towards the king than euer it was before.
' sute' - deliberate decoys, who by wearing the royal arms hoped to reduce the danger to Henry himself. Another of these seems to have been Lord Stafford, who has already been dispatched by Douglas before the scene opens; in both cases the latter believes that he has killed the King. When Hotspur identifies the dead man as Blunt, remarking as he does so that 'the King hath many marching in his coats', he receives the furious reply, ‘I’ll murder all his wardrobe, piece by piece'; and Douglas does indeed shortly afterwards find himself face to face with Henry. As they engage in a furious hand-to-hand struggle the King is forced to his knees, and saved only in the nick of time by the arrival of the Prince of Wales, who puts his assailant somewhat ignominiously to flight.1 Oddly enough, Douglas reappears a few moments later, during the fight between the Prince and Hotspur, when he silently attacks -of all people - Falstaff, before disappearing from the play for good.
Not surprisingly, in his account of the battle, Shakespeare takes a few liberties in the interests of his drama. Holinshed suggests that Henry met Douglas at an early stage of the three-hour battle, after which the Prince was withdrawn from that side of the field, while Blunt and Stafford — and probably a third knight, Sir Hugh Shirley — remained, only to be slaughtered shortly afterwards. (There can, however, be no doubt that the Kin
g - who, it must be remembered, was still only thirty-six — fought with exemplary courage throughout.) Did the Prince really save his father's life? There is some evidence, but not much. Holinshed goes no further than to say that the Prince 'holpe his father like a lustie yoong gendeman'; Samuel Daniel asserts that he did indeed save the King; but Daniel was writing an epic, and was probably no more conscientiously accurate than Shakespeare himself.
Did Prince Hal kill Harry Percy? Possibly, yes. Most historians are sceptical; it has been pointed out that the true Hotspur - as opposed to the Shakespearean ideal - was twenty-three years older than the Prince, a seasoned general for whom Hal had a deep respect and who, on those early Welsh campaigns, had taught him all he knew. This is undoubtedly true as far as it goes; but Percy was now a dangerous and desperate rebel, and nothing that we read of either of them suggests that in such
Still more humiliating was the fate he subsequently suffered: The earle of Dowglas, for haste, falling from the crag of an hie mounteine, brake one of his cullions [testicles] and was taken.'
a situation either would have hesitated to kill the other. There is also an admittedly ambiguous passage in Holinshed - one of the many that makes us wish that he had written just one degree better than he did -which reads: 'the other on his part . . . fought valiantlie, and slue the lord Persie'; we are given no indication of who 'the other' may be, but in the previous sentence the chronicler is certainly speaking of the King, and the Prince surely seems a likelier candidate than anyone else.
Whoever may have been responsible for it, the death of Harry Hotspur ends not only the battie of Shrewsbury but, effectively, Shakespeare's play. Prince Hal makes his noble speech
Shakespeare's Kings Page 17